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AFOL stands for "Adult Fan Of LEGO".
From an unofficial LEGO acronym glossary:
AFOL
Adult Fan of LEGO. The most common term used to refer to LEGO fans who are adults. Generally pronounced to rhyme with “hay-foal”.
Or from Brickipedia's glossary (also unofficial):
AFOL - Adult Fan Of LEGO

With the exception of evergreen themes like CITY and Duplo, it's not easy to predict when sets are released. Based on trends of the last 11 years, I've included the last 20 train sets that have been released in a table:
At least one train set has been released each year apart from the year 2008. The table marks an average of 1.66 train sets per year. It's ...

Some of it may be your own perception changing, such as a room you remember being big when you were a kid, but which you find small as an adult. So when you perceive bricks as being softer, it could actually be that they aren't, but that your perception changed. (If you were to walk barefoot on LEGO bricks for one hour per day, your feet would eventually ...

I can't definitively answer, but I can say that this has been a common observation around the late 1990's and early 2000's-- nothing to do with Chinese manufacturing.
I personally made the observation when comparing construction in large-scale creations in 1999/2000 and later in 2005. The large scale creation in 1999/2000 was a very large building, ...

Plastic pieces will become harder over time. Not sure why, but I think it is that the substance that were added to make the plastic a little softer evaporates over time.
I have been told that the people designing sets for LEGO never use pieces older than 2 years. This is because harder pieces will have more clutch power than softer pieces and because of ...

According to the What is BrickCon? page, BrickCon claims to be the "longest running fan-based LEGO® convention". Its first edition took place in 2002.
Note that there are events which are older (LEGOworld in the Netherlands for example which I believe started in 2001), so I suppose BrickCon's claim is specific for conventions, and not exhibitions - although ...

There is a new cowboy set based on the lone ranger film coming out this year-summer 2013, looks really good for younger generation but thats it for the moment- not really a afol kit as such. info came from brickset- there were some pictures too, i think the article was about three months ago.

There may not be anything aside from the North Georgia LEGO Train Club, but it looks like you could start one from the Waiting List - AFOL there also appears to have been a newsgroup lugnet.loc.us.ga.atl.